What happened to friend.tech? Chats fell with key prices

What happened to friend.tech? It launched on Base in August 2023 as a social app where entry to each person’s private chat was a “key” whose price rose with every purchase along a bonding curve, and it faded once trading in those keys dried up. Version 2 and the FRIEND token in May 2024 brought users back only briefly, and on 8 September 2024 the team handed control of its smart contracts to Ethereum’s null address, so nobody can change them again. The team said the web app would keep working; The Block wrote that friend.tech had been “effectively shuttered”. Our reading: when the price of a chat is itself a tradeable position, the chat lives and dies with the price. Disclosure: we build Cherry (cherry.fun), a wallet-to-wallet messenger with paid group chats, so Cherry gets one section near the end.

What happened to friend.tech, in dates

How keys worked: a curve and a fee on every trade

Each account had its own chat, and you needed at least one of that person’s keys to read it. The Block described the mechanics on 20 September 2023: “When a key is bought or sold, a 5% fee goes to the app, and a 5% fee goes to the channel’s owner”, and the price rises on a bonding curve as more people join. Data Always, an on-chain analysis newsletter, wrote the curve out on 16 September 2023: the price in ETH was the number of keys squared, divided by 16,000.

Two consequences follow. A key holder paid 10% in fees on each buy and 10% again on each sell, and The Block noted that buyers were “losing 10% of the cost of joining or leaving a channel.” The chat’s owner earned 5% of every trade, buys and sells alike, so a creator’s income tracked how often their keys changed hands. Weekly points added a third reason to trade: the hope of an airdrop was, in The Block’s words, “one carrot to keep people trading keys.”

The team’s statement and the press reading

The team. In its post of 8 September 2024, friend.tech said the admin and ownership parameters had been set to the zero address “to prevent any changes to their fees or functionality in the future”, that the website at friend.tech “will continue to function as is”, and that “No fees from either smart contracts or [the website] currently go to the friend.tech dev team multisig” (quoted by The Block, Cointelegraph and DailyCoin). In a follow-up post that CCN dated 9 September 2024, the team said it had “no plans to shutter or discontinue” the web app and that “Everything you know and use remains the same.”

The press. The Block wrote on 8 September 2024 that friend.tech “has been effectively shuttered” and that the revocation made new features “unlikely, if not impossible.” The Defiant’s subhead said onlookers “inferred the FriendTech effectively shuttered the project”. CryptoPotato’s headline of 9 September 2024 said the “Dev Team Abandons the Project”, and CCN reported a “widely negative reception” to the team’s post. Those are the outlets’ readings; the team said it was keeping the app open.

Why key-gated chat faded

The price of entry and the reason to stay were the same number. A key was a seat in the chat and a position at once, so a buyer judged it two ways: is the chat worth reading, and will the next buyer pay more? When new buyers stopped arriving, the holders who came for the second answer sold, each sale lowered the price for everyone still holding, and the chat thinned with it.

The fees pointed the same way. A creator was paid per trade, so churn paid better than a settled room of readers, while each member paid 10% to come in and 10% again to leave. Weekly points and the hope of an airdrop kept people trading in 2023; once the token arrived in May 2024, that reason was spent. The Block counted about $60,000 in protocol fees from June to early September 2024, and Cointelegraph reported daily fees below $1,000 since late July.

The curve had defenders: DeFiance Capital’s Arthur Cheong told The Block in September 2023 that it kept rooms small enough for owners to talk to their key holders. In the same piece Dingaling, then owner of the 13th most expensive channel, doubted it “makes much sense to pay 10k as an entry fee to someone’s secret chat room.”

What SocialFi means

SocialFi joins social apps and finance: following, joining or talking to someone is tied to an on-chain payment or a token. CCN wrote in September 2024 that friend.tech’s launch set off a wave of new SocialFi apps. SocialFi is one slice of onchain social , the broader idea of keeping identity, follows or payments on a blockchain; Farcaster is another, and our dated account of what happened to Farcaster covers it.

Is friend.tech dead, and can you still use it?

Frozen is the accurate word. Nobody can change the contracts on Base: the team gave up the option of new updates or bug fixes, as CCN put it in September 2024. The team never announced a shutdown. In October 2026 the web app at friend.tech still loads with a Connect button, Clubs and People tabs and a field to search keys, and shows no notice about its status.

A revival bid came and went in 2026. On 27 August 2026 Phemex News reported that Machi Big Brother said he had submitted a $1 million offer to buy friend.tech from founder Racer and Paradigm, with a restart through a community takeover in mind. The Defiant reported that the bid covered the X account and the domain, since the contracts belong to the null address. COINOTAG reported on 6 September 2026 that he withdrew the offer in a post the day before.

What this means for community owners

Sell access to a room at a fixed price. If your members also hold a position in the room’s price, their interest in your content lasts as long as the price rises, and your income comes from their churn. A fixed entry fee or a subscription pays you for the people who stay.

Members judge a paid room by who runs it, what past members say and what happens when a payment lapses; our guide to vetting a paid crypto group lists those checks.

Where Cherry fits

On Cherry the owner sets the price, and it does not move with demand. A paid group or paid channel charges a one-time entry fee of 0.0001 to 100 SOL or a USDC subscription of 1 to 10,000 USDC per day, week or month. Changing the price creates a new plan, and existing subscribers keep their terms. As of 10 September 2026, 70% of each payment goes to the owner’s wallet and 30% to Cherry, and a one-time entry starts the membership once the payment confirms on-chain.

Members of a paid group can rate it from 1 to 5 with a written review, and the rating and count show on the group’s public storefront. When a subscription lapses, the member is paywalled: they stay a member, the room stays in their chat list, and messages are withheld until they renew, on a web app screen headed “Renew your membership”. Cancelling keeps access to the end of the paid period. Group chats on Cherry are not end-to-end encrypted, so moderation and bots work in them.

In October 2026 the SOLANA 中文 room listed its entry rule as “Hold a .skr domain OR Pay 1 USDC to join” and showed 4.8 stars from 5 reviews.

See also Telegram paid channels vs Cherry and on-chain membership tools such as Hypersub . To start, create a group at chat.cherry.fun and add a payment rule.

Nothing here is financial advice.

FAQ

What happened to friend.tech?

friend.tech launched on Base in August 2023 and sold entry to each person’s chat as a key priced on a bonding curve. Trading surged in September 2023 and then faded. Version 2 and the FRIEND token followed in May 2024, and on 8 September 2024 the team moved control of its smart contracts to Ethereum’s null address, so nobody can change them again.

Is friend.tech dead?

It is frozen, and the team never announced a shutdown. In a post CCN dated 9 September 2024 the team said it had “no plans to shutter or discontinue” the web app, while The Block described friend.tech as “effectively shuttered”. In October 2026 the web app still loads, with no notice about its status.

Can you still use friend.tech?

The web app at friend.tech still loads in October 2026, with a Connect button, Clubs and People tabs and a field to search keys. Nobody can change its contracts on Base, so no new features or fixes are expected.

What is SocialFi?

SocialFi is the crypto label for social apps where following, joining or talking to someone is tied to an on-chain payment or a token. On friend.tech, access to a person’s chat was a key that traded on a price curve, and every trade paid fees to the creator and to the app.

What replaced friend.tech for paid chats?

No single app replaced it. The common alternative is a fixed price set by the owner, such as a paid group on Cherry: a one-time SOL entry fee or a USDC subscription, at a price the owner sets. As of 10 September 2026 the owner receives 70% of each payment and Cherry 30%.

Sources

• The Block on the contract handover, 8 September 2024
• The Block on key fees and the bonding curve, 20 September 2023
• Cointelegraph on friend.tech’s admin transfer to the null address, 9 September 2024
• The Defiant on the transfer to the burn address
• CCN on the team’s follow-up statement, 9 September 2024
• DailyCoin on the team’s statements, 10 September 2024
• CryptoPotato on the contract handover, 9 September 2024
• Data Always on the key price curve, 16 September 2023
• Phemex News on the $1 million offer, 27 August 2026
• The Defiant on Machi Big Brother’s bid for friend.tech
• COINOTAG on the withdrawn offer, 6 September 2026
• friend.tech web app
• SOLANA 中文 on Cherry